"Asphodel, That Greeny Flower" is a rather long meditative
poem, divided into three books and a coda. The poet is addressing his wife, whom he has
abused through his sexual and artistic pursuits. He is approaching her one last time,
reviewing their life together and asking her forgiveness. Here Williams is no longer
dispersing himself into a set of objects; the "I," slowly purged from his verse
in the teens, now returns in the figure of a wise old man who, while aware of loss and
suffering, offers advice, hope and consolation. Old age has always held its right to its
opinions and Williams is now not reluctant to state his explicitly.

. . .

[I]n "Asphodel" Williams often explains the significances of
his images. After describing "the statue / of Colleoni's horse / with the thickset
little man // on top / in armor / presenting a naked sword" and "the horse
rampant / roused by the mare in / the Venus and Adonis," Williams comments that
"these are pictures / of crude force.""Of love, abiding love // it
will be telling," he says of the asphodel. As we shall see, the images in this poem
are rich, fluid, complex; his comments by no means exhaust their significance. But the
effect of this discursive quality is to ease the reader's movement through the verse.
"It is not // a flute note either, it is the relation / of a flute note / to a
drum," Williams writes in "The Orchestra."Relations here emerge as
more important than discrete objects, and these relations are often articulated at the
surface of the poetry. Creative activity now takes place at a "higher" level of
consciousness; Williams does not take us to the edge of unconscious chaos but to a place
in the mind where form and continuity become more predominant.

Williams's poetry of the 1950's thus has a more accessible surface--a
fact that accounts for its greater critical popularity. Other manifestations of this
loosening up are his unequivocal acceptance of romantic feeling and his dependence on
personal, biographical material. In "Asphodel," emotions, like ideas, are often
stated: "with fear in my heart," "I regret,""I
adore," "I am tortured // and cannot rest." Moreover, these feelings are
much tenderer than any Williams had previously been willing to admit to his verse.

In the poem, Williams now turns to address his wife directly and
remorsefully. Old, nearing death, he approaches her "perhaps for the last time."
The time is winter, but this is more an internal state than a season in
Rutherford--defined by the strong sense of loss, fading, and mutability with which the
poem begins. "Today // I'm filled with the fading memory of those flowers / that we
both loved," Williams says. He recalls first the "poor // colorless"
asphodel, a flower that grows in the meadows of New Jersey, but also (he had read in
Homer) along the fields in the underworld. In fact, Williams speaks at the start as if
from among the dead, identifying with their groping recollection as they gaze at the
asphodel: "What do I remember / that was shaped / as this thing is
shaped?"--"There is something / something urgent" which he must say, but he
does not want to rush it--"while I drink in / the joy of your approach, / perhaps for
the last time"--and fading powers of memory make it hard to begin. There is an
urgency about the very act of speech: "I dare not stop. / Listen while I talk on //
against time."

. . .

He gropes for memory, for speech, for his wife's love--the three will
become identified in the course of the poem--for these have the power to save him from
time's push toward oblivion; they can bring him back from the realm of the dead.

At the end of Book III of "Asphodel" Williams does gain the
forgiveness he seeks: "You have forgiven me / making me new again." And the
asphodel becomes the appropriate symbol for this renewal of love in the poet's old age:
though colorless and odorless, "little prized among the living" it is a sturdy
perennial: "I have invoked the flower / in that // frail as it is / after winter's
harshness / it comes again."

"Asphodel". . .speaks from a plane beyond differentiation,
from the site of memory where "all appears/ as if seen/ wavering through water,"
perspectiveless like the time of beginning itself. It is a "cry/ of recognition"
which penetrates the veil of history to connect his "Approaching death" with his
origins. Interestingly, it has been the poem most praised by critics because of Williams'
late breakthrough, presumably like Stevens', to a new lyricism. And this signifies not
simply an advance beyond Paterson but a reversal, perhaps, ironically, a return to
the tradition. But the tradition to which "Asphodel" appeals is that of the
"rituals of the hunt/ on the walls/ of prehistoric// caves in the Pyrenees." As
was suggested earlier, the caves offer man a present entry into time and place, of the
primordial origins of art itself. At the impending moment of his own death, the poet sings
of origins: the "cave" which is both beginning and end, and the "hunt"
or quest to which man is compelled in his desire.

"Asphodel". . .comes very near to suggesting a poetics no
longer resigned to failure or to the hermeneutical circle. It comes very near to insisting
that the "secret word" has been possessed, the son reconciled with the father,
and thus a language fully achieved--that the "place/ dedicated in the imagination/ to
memory// of the dead" has come to be more real than the world. . . .It is not a poem
of quest or effort, but a dream of virtue recovered and held "against time."

In one of the last poetry readings he was able to give, at Wellesley in
1956, Williams read "Asphodel, that Greeny Flower." Lowell movingly recalls the
hush that fell over the enormous audience when the now-famous poet, "one whole side
partly paralysed, his voice just audible," read this "triumph of simple
confession". . . .

Like "Paterson, Five," "Asphodel" marks a return to
tradition, in this case the pastoral love poem in which the penitent husband makes amends
to his long-suffering wife. No more snatches of documentary prose, no Cubist or Surrealist
superpositions or dislocations. The poem is stately and consistent, an autobiographical
lyric in the Romantic tradition.

"Asphodel, that Greeny Flower" can be regarded as a garland
for the fifties. But the Williams who speaks to the poets of our own generation is, I
think, less the loving, apologetic husband of "Asphodel" or the aspiring
American bard of Paterson than he is a Voyager to Pagany, to the Paris of the
twenties; he is the poet as passionate defender of the faith that "to engage roses /
becomes a geometry."

Finally there is "Asphodel, That Greeny Flower," the
extraordinary love poem of Williams' old age. This poem has the quiet mastery of supreme
attainment. Like Paterson Five and "The Desert Music,"
"Asphodel" gathers the world together and the lines rise continuously from a
center which is everywhere. Since the lines ascend one by one from the same unfathomable
ground, each is the equivalent of the others, the same and yet different. Flowers are
facts, poems flowers, And "all works of the imagination,/interchangeable." Each
object could be substituted for any of the others, for all say the same thing, do that one
thing which all poetic speech does - perpetuate the dance. In the extreme reach of his
imagination the poet enters a space where:

no distinction

any more suffices to differentiate

the particulars

of place and condition

Interchangeability enters in yet another way, for in
"Asphodel" beauty is expressed not in a single image, of dance or music, but in
a group of images all standing side by side in the poem to say the same thing, each saying
it perfectly but in a unique way. The space of the poem is the poet's memory. Everything
which has ever happened to him is brought back in its substantiality, "a whole
flood/of sister memories." It is also, and pre-eminently, the space of love, for
"Asphodel" is a poem "of love, abiding love," the poet's final
affirmation of his love for his wife and of the way the relation between them creates and
sustains the world. The poem is also the space of language, of a murmuring speech which
the poet prolongs defiantly and yet precariously, with infinite gentleness, against time
and death:

And so

with fear in my heart

I drag it out

and keep on talking

for I dare not stop.

Listen while I talk on

against time.

The space of the poet's sustaining speech is the realm of the
imagination, "the place made/in our lives/for the poem." This place is also the
sea, or rather the waves on the surface of the sea. The sea is the profound depth from
which all things have come to dance like waves as the lines dance in the poem. The
"sea/which no one tends/is also a garden," earth giving birth to flowers as the
sea to waves. Sea, garden, poem, love, and memory are equivalents, and "the glint of
waves," "the free interchange/of light over their surface," is the play of
words in the poem, the blossoming of flowers in a garden.

These images lead to others. The poem is speech in defiance of death.
Here, at the very end of Williams' career, death appears in his world for almost the first
time. It is another name for the unfathomable ground. The poem flowers from it and yet
contains it.

As Asphodel is the flower of hell but still triumphs over the darkness,
so the space of the poem is not hell but is the flower which rises above death, for
"love and the imagination/are of a piece,/swift as the light/to avoid
destruction." This leads to a final group of images, once more interchangeable with
the others. Asphodel, the flower of hell, is the atomic bomb, since "the bomb/also/is
a flower." The exploding bomb is equated with a distant thunderstorm over the sea
which the poet watches with his wife. The poem prolongs indefinitely the moment just
before death. It is speech in the shadow of death and dwells in the light of a perpetual
present, between the lightning and the thunderclap, between the sight of the exploding
bomb and the coming of annihilating heat. In "Asphodel, That Greeny Flower"
light, the sea, memory, speech, the garden, and love are the same, and the poem maintains
forever in living poise the moment between birth and death. As long as that moment lasts
the flame of beauty is held in the open:

The light

for all time shall outspeed

the thunder crack.

This radiant promise is the climax of Williams' writing, and the climax
too of the development so far of twentieth-century poetry.

In Williams' very last poems, the conflict of engendering the work of art subsides
somewhat. As we have seen previously (Chapter One), the more radical poetic practice of
early Williams tied to memory as the place where this imaginative conflict occurs,
yields in the later poems to a vision of personal memory. Perhaps not surprisingly, this
later development allows Williams to write some of his most moving love poems, among them
"Asphodel, That Greeny Flower" (PB, 153-182). Thus we come to an examination of
Williams' later style in full awareness of its permutations. The compassionate
understanding present throughout his work here takes the form of a love poem written to
his wife Flossie.

I want to examine the end of the poem where the poet/speaker describes the memory of
his wedding:

For our wedding, too,
the
light was wakened
and
shone. The light!
the light stood before us
waiting!
I
thought the world
stood still.
At
the altar
so
intent was I
before my vows,
so
moved by your presence
a
girl so pale
and ready to faint
that
I pitied
and
wanted to protect you.
As I think of it now,
after
a lifetime,
it
is as if
a sweet-scented flower
were
poised
and
for me did open.
Asphodel
has
no odor
save
to the imagination
but it too
celebrates
the light.
It
is late
but an odor
as
from our wedding
has
revived for me
and begun again to penetrate
into
all crevices
of
my world.

Although I almost feel it as an impertinence to offer a commentary to this poem, I
think we might notice the quality of gentle precision in the diction here. In ''as if / a
sweet-scented flower / were poised / and for me did open," the somewhat archaic verb
form at the end seems to render the gentle touch of someone who is being very careful. The
world of which the poet speaks at the end of the poem is a world known well by any student
of Williams' work. His is a freedom born of compassion, earned in the conflict of the
imagination, and exemplified in the grace of an unmatched expressive style.

from Modern Poetic Practice: Structure and Genesis. New York: Peter Lang,
1986.